So many things...

I have so much to write about, so many ideas bouncing around in my head that I hardly know where to start.

My mind has been racing for days with ideas for the overhaul I am about to do on the house, for the blog, for things I want to create, things I want to do on the fan page. I have been trying to write them all down as they come to me, but as they tend to hit me at night when I am trying to go to sleep, that can be hard to do at times. I do not have a nightstand or anything, so keeping a little notepad is out of the question for now. BUT, I am about to move my bed, so once I do that, I will have room for a little table. Right now my side of the bed is against one of the walls.

Anyway, there are sooo many things I am going to be doing. I have decided to make the month of February a "Project Month." I am going to spend all of this month working on the house. Moving things, redecorating ( with things I already have ) painting, and getting things "right."

We finished the bulk of the kitchen table and chairs Monday and brought them in the house. I still have to paint the tiles on the top, but that is an inside the house job as I need it to be climate controlled for this particular paint to dry quickly. I am so thrilled with the table already. It has been so nice to sit here and eat together, and to have work space other than my desk and the very limited counter space I have here. Once I paint the tiles, which will be this weekend I think, I will do a dedicated post just for it instead of throwing a few pics of it in to this post. I want to be able to post them all at once so you can all see it from start to finish. I am really proud of us, it looks great and it really made the house feel so much different. More homey. It made me want to do so many other things. Hence the project month.

I will have to do most of it myself, as Jack is unable to do much still. He had two back to back MRI's today, one with contrast dye and one without. The radiation makes him really sick, so he was not feeling well at all when he got out of there. I had to drive home. We stopped at a grocery store and spent the last 22 dollars to our name to get a little food to hopefully get us through till the 9th when my stamps come in, but 22 bucks does not go very far these days. This month sucked, as we had to renew our insurance policy and renew the tag on the truck this month. We had to get an extension on our light bill, as we could not afford it. We will probably not be able to afford it on the 14th, which is when it is now due either, especially since our rent has been raised...but at least we have power until then. I have borrowed all I can borrow and asked everyone I can ask, so there just is no where else to turn.

So instead of dwelling on what I can not change, I will work on what I CAN change.

On to other things, Vickie at Aoibheal's Lair, who was participating in the Ten Things Thursday with me, has decided to move on and stop doing the Thursday post. She said she feels it is time to move on, and that it is hard coming up with a theme each week. I totally agree with her on this. Even though I "created" the weekly meme, I, too, find it increasingly hard to find ten things to write about in such a manner. So while I am not going to stop doing it totally, I am no longer going to try to do it weekly. ( Not that I have managed to do so in the last few weeks anyway LOL ) Now I will do it when the mood strikes me. I am also tossing around ideas in my head for a couple of new segments here on the blog. Not an every week thing, because I have learned that my life will almost always prevent me from posting when I am "supposed" to, so I will post them on the day they are named for when I get the chance. I have beaten myself up emotionally over my blog so much, because I feel like I should be here every second of every day, writing away, when the reality is I have to write as time and circumstance allow. I have noticed that when I stop bullying myself about it, I tend to write more, and the words come a lot easier than if I am screaming at myself that I should be writing.

I feel big changes coming. I hope that some of them are good for once.

More House Renovations: The Kitchen

Where oh where have I been? I have been a busy little witch over the last couple of weeks, spending a lot of time at my parents house and then when I got home, working on stuff around the house. I have a handful of blogs planned, but I wanted to start with this one because I am just so damn happy about it!

I love to cook. I really do. I also love to bake, however baking sweets ( cakes, cookies, pies, etc. ) is beyond me. I never seem to be able to have it turn out the way I want. It is so frustrating at times because I love to do it SO much. The problem is, the kitchen I have is very small, poorly built in the way of very little counter space, and the biggest counter surface is stuck in a corner behind the stove so you can not use it, other than to store stuff on. So while yes, I love to cook, my kitchen leaves me pretty uninspired to do so. It looked bad, the cabinets were wood grain and nasty looking, the bottom counters and the three drawers built beside the stove are broken and only the top one is somewhat usable ( It holds the can openers and the cookie cutters, thats about it..) I still have done nothing with the drawers or under the sink cabinets, as those will require some repair work ( our landlord is useless, we do it all ourselves ) but I did tackle the biggest eyesore in the kitchen, which was the icky wall behind the stove and the upper cabinets, which I use daily.

I have planned this since we painted the living room, as my kitchen and living room are all one big room, separated by a bar, so the color scheme was to be carried over into the kitchen as well so it would look uniform. As always, after Alex and Jack were in bed the other night, at 11 PM I got a wild hair up my ass and decided to tackle it. It was not as easy as I thought, as the cabinets took a LOT of coats to cover, and I finally finished around 4 AM. However I am over the moon thrilled with the results, and I love being in there now, and I will turn around in my chair here at the computer and just stare at the cabinets from time to time, I admit it lol.

I almost forgot to take pictures, and I had half of the back wall painted before I remembered to do so lol. So here we go with the picture show! It may not look like much, but compared to what it was before, it is 100 times better!

I will describe each pic under the pic itself....

This is the kitchen before. Note how cramped and cluttered it is, and how gross those cabinets are! If you look to the right of the stove, you can see the biggest part of the counter is stuffed in the corner, virtually unusable. I had painted half the back wall before I thought to grab the camera lol.

Here is the kitchen with the back wall painted with the first coat, and I moved the behemoth microwave out of the kitchen and it now lives on my dryer, usable, but out of the way so I get that prime piece of counter space back on the left... 

Here is the pic with the cabinets painted with a few coats..that blue thing on top of the cabinets is a first aid kit lol...I also painted the range hood which was a rusted looking used to be cream colored nightmare. I painted the top half tan and the bottom part white, to contrast with the white and tan cabinets...

Here are the finished cabinets, and my little wood kitchen mortar back in place on the back of the stove...

Here is the final shot of the new paint, with no flash..that black spot in the middle of the cabinets is a metal heart that Jack made me one day while he was bored at work, a piece of thick round metal bent into the shape of a heart and hung on a nail...normally a metal tea ball which was a gift from my best friend hangs there too, but it needed a good washing before I put it back up...

And there you have it. I still have the big wall to my right to do, but I need Jack for that as the pantry cabinets and spice racks are bolted to the wall and I need his help to move them, but I will take pics when I do that too!

As I said, it may not look like much, but if you look at the before and after pics, there is a huge difference. I love to cook in there now, and last night, again on a whim, I made my first ever cherry dump cake....from scratch, no store bought cake mix, and it came out PERFECTLY! I finally baked something sweet that you could actually eat! I take that as a sign that the kitchen spirits are pleased with my changes lol. It has inspired me SO much, that even though Friday's are my " Bella refuses to cook, so we have take out" day, I VOLUNTARILY asked Jack to stop by the store and get the fixings for me to make homemade tacos tonight. YUM!

I have some pics of the bathroom, but I intend to finish it this weekend, I still have to paint the sink cabinet and the door, so I will save that post for when it is done. Wicked will have a few things to say this weekend as well, so look for that over on The Wicked Witch of the South...and I have more blogs to post here this weekend as well, if not on Monday which I have dubbed " Blog Day"

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!